Crowdsourcing Maps

Shiny Happy People vs. the Ghost In the Machine (crowdsourcing maps feature)

jteischeid@yahoo.com — Fri, 25 May 2007 13:19:03 -0400

Geography isn't just about maps anymore. In much the same way that language is the foundation of the works of William Shakespeare and Ernest Hemingway, geography is now forming the foundation of something new. Sites like Platial refer to the sub-discipline as "Neogeography." Maps on Platial include notations ranging from the seriously useful, such as the Bag Theft Blog Map for London, to the delightfully flippant, such as the entry "intersection where frat boy screamed lyrics at me."

Interviewing the Experts of Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing Maps

nfolson — Thu, 24 May 2007 03:55:32 -0400

The OpenStreetMap, what's possible when geographic information is shared?

Nate Olson interviews Steve Coast via email May 12-21, 2007

Steve Coast is a London-based programmer at the helm of OpenStreetMap (OSM), one of the Web's premier collaborative mapping projects. OpenStreetMap is billed as "a free editable map of the whole world... made by people like you." Anyone can use a GPS device to map his or her home neighborhood, upload it to OSM, and see the data included in the main user interface. The results are available for re-use under a Creative Commons license--a key selling point of OSM, which Steve created largely as an alternative to the kind of restriction-laden geodata used by Google Maps and similar applications.

Nate Olson: Do you consider "crowdsourcing" to be a distinct phenomenon? If so, how do you see it evolving over the next 1-2 years?

Steve Coast: Most definitely, and hopefully it's going to turn some business models upside down. I think of it more broadly than just building commons a la OpenStreetMap or Wikipedia. If you consider zopa.com (the peer money-lending site) as crowdsourcing, then you can start to see some really powerful things happening. They give savers with little capital access to high interest rates, and [also give] borrowers access to better-than-average [repayment] rates while doing interesting social stuff on the side. All while removing this big "bank" concept. You could think of Skype and Joost similarly--no need for expensive cable distribution networks when you force your users to do the bandwidth for you (they're both p2p apps).

The International Page, Crowdsourcing Around the Globe

Quick update on Steve Coast/OSM, 14 May 07

nfolson — Mon, 14 May 2007 15:50:06 -0400

In brief: I have made contact with Steve Coast, and he has agreed to the interview. I sent him the first round of questions by email the evening of 12 May 07. He is swamped with conference-related travels at the moment, having just left Canada for another presentation in Paris. We nonetheless are hopeful that we can squeeze in two rounds of questions within the next 48 hours or so.

I will post another update here if Steve's travels cause further delays. Results of course will be published here, too.

The International Page, Crowdsourcing Around the Globe

Mapping Communities of Interest

jteischeid@yahoo.com — Mon, 14 May 2007 15:48:42 -0400

Crowdsourcing information through collaborative maps

John Eischeid interviews Di-Ann Eisnor from Platial

Di-Ann Eisnor is founder and CEO of Platial, her third start-up. The mapping site allows users to upload their own information and tag it to a specific location. She and her husband Jason trace the genesis of the idea to the time they spent living in Amsterdam and needed to help their guests find their way around. "We made them maps, like everyone does, of the basic neighborhood amenities," Platial says on its about page "We ended up with a kitchen drawer stuffed full of these notes. It was our collection of Places, plus menus for take out, magazine articles listing kid friendly museums, schedules of parades, and a few brochures and tour books for attractions that seemed interesting enough. A few maps got lost, loaned out or recombined, others got photocopied or emailed or taped to front doors as invitations. Then we moved back to the United States, and that drawer of Places lost its context, it became useless in Portland. We wanted a way to preserve all that knowledge in a powerful, useful, contextual way."
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John Eischeid: Where does the word Platial come from?

Di-Ann Esinor: It was originally going to be the private entrance, but all of the normal sounding domain names were taken.

Q: Do you have plans to enable the layering of data, rather than limiting it to points?

A: Our current infrastructure supports data input by anyone in the form of feeds, CSV or manual place adding (lat/long, business listings, address). Our primary focus is on enabling people to put whatever they want on a map. Have you played with the slider? It displays geographically relevant information from the Platial community, Yahoo! Local, Flickr and others. It collects and serves relevant geographic content across many sources onto maps.

Interviewing the Experts of Crowdsourcing

Steve Coast of OpenStreetMap.

David Cohn — Sat, 12 May 2007 22:39:59 -0400

Assignment Zero contributor Nate Olsen describes this mapping project here:

"Two of the most impressive projects in the mapping space are OpenStreetMap and Geonames. They approach the world's geography from opposite directions--from the street-level, upward, on the one hand, and from the country-level, downward, on the other--which makes them nice complements to one another..."

Interviewing the Experts of Crowdsourcing

Geonames and OpenStreetMap

nfolson — Wed, 09 May 2007 15:28:57 -0400

Two of the most impressive projects in the mapping space are OpenStreetMap and Geonames. They approach the world's geography from opposite directions--from the street-level, upward, on the one hand, and from the country-level, downward, on the other--which makes them nice complements to one another in my mind.

1) OpenStreetMap (often referred to as just OSM) is led by Steve Coast, who's based in the UK. It's described as "a free editable map of the whole world... made by people like you." Progress in its early phases unsurprisingly has been concentrated in the UK and parts of continental Europe, but it seems to be gaining mindshare and momentum in lots of other places. This is a true example of crowdsourcing, as anyone can use a GPS device to map his or her home neighborhood, upload it to OSM, and see it included in the main OSM interface. The results are available for re-use under a share-alike Creative Commons license.

2) Geonames is led by Marc Wick, who's based in Switzerland. At its heart it's actually not a set of maps, but a database of place names--or, more precisely, a combination of databases. In other words, a gigantic gazetteer that catalogues both absolute position (longitude/latitutde) and relative position (political/administrative). Data is gathered mainly from third-party sources (typically government agencies at one level or another) with licenses that allow such re-use. (Marc posts here about one cool example in which data for Gipuzkoa, part of the Basque region in Spain, was donated to Geonames.) From this core of place names, Geonames can display several kinds of related information like demographics, nearby places, relevant Wikipedia entries, and actual maps via Google Maps.

While Geonames is not as thoroughgoing an example of crowdsourcing as OSM--Marc handles most responsibilities in collating the data--there are a variety of ways anyone can get involved. On the input side, people can submit whole datasets, add information for places already in the database (like alternate-language names), or correct errors. Recent changes are shown here. On the output side, the database is made available under an "attribution" Creative Commons license, and Marc has developed a variety of Web services with the help of others. This makes it, like OSM, a platform for many possible applications.

The International Page, Crowdsourcing Around the Globe

Any suggestions on what to ask Di-Ann on Wednesday?

jteischeid@yahoo.com — Sun, 06 May 2007 17:42:36 -0400

Jeff wrote up a pretty good overview of the site. After poking around myself, I've come up with the questions below for Di-Ann. (I'm not sure I'll ask the few at the end.) Any suggestions? Have I missed anything? I hope to interview her on Wednesday.

Where does the word Platial come from?

Do you have plans to enable the layering of data, rather than limiting it to points?

Do you edit or otherwise police the entries?

Has there been any vandalism of public maps, such as the problems Wikipedia has had?

How easy has it been to work with Google (both the Maps and the Earth applications)? There are a lot of variations on their maps, and people are even working on rendering portions of Berlin in 3D with select interiors. Have you considered enabling something similar?

What's next? People can add text, but do you see something like a YouTube hybrid that allows people to upload movies and then tag them to a point on the map? That would be a great way to share vacations.

I noticed you and your husband had this idea a while ago. Were you ever planning in trying to build it from the ground up, without using a third-party mapping technology?

There was a huge spread in the New York Press last week about how all the good neighborhoods are gone, disappearing under tides of gentrification and weekend revelers in from out of town. Have you gotten any complaints from people who think that some information should not be shared?

On your blog, you posted the Gardar Eide Einarsson photo, The World Is Yours. Was that somehow inspirational?

A little off topic, but why Portland?

You haven't been around long. Has your response been what you expected?

What was the most difficult aspect of the project?

How does Platial differentiate itself from another "neighborhood" site or write up?

Interviewing the Experts of Crowdsourcing

Who is using these new features and why?

jteischeid@yahoo.com — Tue, 01 May 2007 12:38:39 -0400

I like this idea of seeing how inventive people can be when combining maps with other data. Users are also doing things than just incorporating data; one even uploaded an animated ferris wheel. User-generated KML files are even being included in a vidoe game, EA's Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars, in which users create renderings of buildings to be uploaded. The interent revolution was all about sharing copious amounts of information, and projects such as these suggest that Web 2.0 will help us put it all into an intelligble context. Such a massive undertaking is too much for one company to undertake (as with the death of A9's picture feature), so it's ripe for crowdsourcing.

More importantly, who is using these new features and why? Have politicians started combing through gCensus to get info for the 08 election? Are environmental groups looking at deforestation? Are travel companies using 3D maps of Berlin or maps on Platial to help tourists plan trips?

Crowdsourcing Maps

A9 Fails

John C Abell — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 17:52:09 -0400

http://techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20061002/155539&cid=7

mentions as a next great thing geotagging, which flickr does.

Crowdsourcing Maps

Google My Maps: the 800-pound gorrilla returns

John C Abell — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 10:06:59 -0400

Some news reports are already calling this Web 2.0 killer app for crowdsourced maps:

For a neato example, check out this Oral History of famed Route66

I just wish they had thought of a sexier name ...

Crowdsourcing Maps

Google Earth maps the Holocaust

David Cohn — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 03:43:08 -0400

From Personal Democracy Forum

Google Earth has partnerd with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the Museum's Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative. The idea is to document and display the effects of mass atrocities in their early stages. Read more here.

Crowdsourcing Maps

Get me rewrite! (Catchall ideas, reporting, suggestions)

John C Abell — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 15:21:32 -0400

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to pitch an angle none of the geniuses here have thought of.

What are we missing? Think up a sidebar, timeline, profile, scene-setter or whatever that tells a part of the story you don't think is getting the attention it deserves.

Also, if anyone wants to cull through the reporting that already been filed and organize it into an outline, or file a few paragraphs, this is the place to do it.

Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

Slate writes about crowdsourced traveling

David Cohn — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 12:29:11 -0400

"The most developed Wiki-style travel site is Wikitravel. Started in 2003, it uses the same software as Wikipedia but is owned by a different company. (Two others, World Wikia and World66, are weaker.) The idea of Wikitravel is that everyone is potentially a travel writer."

http://www.slate.com/id/2163727/nav/tap2/

Crowdsourcing Maps

gCensus

Jeff Muckensturm — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 15:35:52 -0400

A student--or students--from Stanford is working on a project that lets users combine 2000 Census data with Google Earth called gCensus. It's a browser based program--well, you need to download Google Earth too--that's open to anyone for free. So, you don't need to buy expensive GIS software to make maps.

From the gCensus site: "gCensus is an effort to make geographic data freely and easily accessible to the public, without the need for expensive GIS software packages. With Google's excellent free mapping program Google Earth, you can use this site to visualize a wide variety of data best displayed on a map. Currently, only the US Census 2000's Summary File 1 (displaying population characteristics such as race and age) is available for mapping."

All you have to do is select the information you want--which is, for now, limited to the 2000 Census--and where you want it. Then you can download a .kmz file that will open in Google Earth and look like this:

Direct link to gCensus site: http://gecensus.stanford.edu/gcensus/index.html

Crowdsourcing Maps

Initial Thoughts on Platial

Jeff Muckensturm — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 15:15:40 -0400

I just spent about thirty to forty-five minutes poking around the Platial website. Basically, Platial allows its users to, first, plot points on a Google map, then add information, like a short description or photo, about each point, and finally share their map on their blog or MySpace page.

According to Platial's About Page, "The specific concept for building an online, shared mapping tool came after Di-Ann and I had moved to Amsterdam in 2004. We encouraged a lot of people to come visit, to stay with us, to hang out. But we had to work, deal with the kids, etc, and couldn't be tour guides all day long." And that's all the site is really used for. The front page mostly includes maps of locations of user's favorite bars, or places they fell off their bike, or stops on a recent trip. Here's a good example: Civil Rights Geography.

Most of the maps I found on the site were personal, like maps of trip stops. But, crowdsourcing can be used on the maps. When you first create a map, you can choose to make it open to other users to add information. That way a group of people can add locations they are interested in, and share a story about each site with text, photos, and video.

You can add information by either typing in an address, or from importing a spreadsheet (.csv files only, but is nice if you had a ton of information), or from a blog (I couldn't figure out how that worked). You can't just drag a point onto the map.

While the site is nice for sharing your personal information about points of interest in your town, I found a few major drawbacks to it being a truly useful crowdsourcing tool. Say you're working with a group on a local political campaign. The group goes from door to door and asks people who they plan on voting for in the upcoming election. Everyone puts their information into a spreadsheet, including address, and voting intent (No names for privacy). With normal Geographic Information Systems programs, like ArcView or MapInfo, you could geocode (plot them on a street map) the addresses with a different color point for who the person at that address intends to vote for. So, say blue points are people who intend to vote for your candidate and red points are people who intend to vote for your opponent. After looking at the finished map, you could see what neighborhoods are more likely to vote for your opponent, and target those areas for your campaign. The goal being to turn all the red points into blue points. Platial only has four different point type available (Blue, red, green, and orange diamonds). Blue is "My Places," orange is "Platial," red is points with "images," and green is "Biz listings." You can't change them.

The second problem is you can't layer information. You can only plot points, and you can't have a map that, say, can compare income data between census tracts. A good map that combines both points and area data is one David Cohn brought up called Healthcare that Works. It shows race data combined with hospital closing data.

The power in mapping comes when you can put complicated information, like census data, into a beautiful, easy to understand, visual. Platial doesn't have that kind of power. But if you want to make a map, for your out-of-town friends, of bars with more than 20 beers on tap, then you're in luck.

Interviewing the Experts of Crowdsourcing

University student compiles total resource comparison map -- work seized by DOD

RWilliamKing — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 11:50:43 -0400

There was an article a few years ago I believe about a George Mason University student who compiled a map including topographical information, lines of travel, lines of power, road maps, water pipe maps... it was an amalgamation of data, and then the project was abruptly seized by the Department of Defense and classified.

I'm trying to find the article that references this, so I will update later.

Edit: His name was Sean Gorman, a graduate of George Mason University.

Here's the WashingtonPost.com article about it (accessed 29 March 2007, article dated 8 July 2003)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23689-2003Jul7

I think someone ought to interview this guy about his work.

Crowdsourcing Maps

Travel Guides by Everyone

JJackUnrau — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:40:57 -0400

You often see people refer to the Lonely Planet as their bible when they're off travelling the globe, but guidebooks get out of date so quickly. That's where the crowd at forums like LP's Thorntree Forums come in. I've used them to get (often conflicting) advice in the past on things like where you'll be the only dirty smelly backpacker at any given time.

Crowdsourcing Maps

Write the big feature on crowdsourced maps.

David Cohn — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 23:45:38 -0500

We need someone to write the big feature on crowdsourced maps. If you are interested in this assignment, please tell us why you're a good candidate below. You'll hear back from us as soon as we're ready to get you writing. The story may change depending on what the crowd shares in the meantime. We'll keep you in the loop.

Interviewing the Experts of Crowdsourcing

Di-Ann Eisnor of Platial on crowdsourcing maps.

David Cohn — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 23:43:33 -0500

Platial takes small bits of people's understanding of local geography and combines them. It is the wisdom of the crowd applied to cartography. As you can see in our crowdsourcing maps topic there are all kinds of directions you can take this collective wisdom. Platial is a great example of "Neogeography" in action. We need to interview Di-Ann not only to find out how Platial uses the wisdom of the crowd to benefit the knowledge everyone can have of their local geography, but how she sees it evolving.

Check out their blog to learn more and apply below to interview Di-Ann Eisnor of Platial.

Interviewing the Experts of Crowdsourcing

Look into Gawker Stalker.

David Cohn — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 23:41:46 -0500

Tell us everything we need to know about Gawker Stalker. Everything is useful - links, descriptions, data, anecdotes. If this is something you've followed or want to research, the more details, the better.

Could this be a larger profile? (For those of you have been following George Clooney's fight against Gawker Stalker, hands off -- that interview belongs only to Lauren. Table for two, please!)

Crowdsourcing Maps

Help us prepare for the Platial interview.

David Cohn — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 23:37:20 -0500

We will be doing an interview with the founder of Platial soon. But what should we know before the big interview date?

What questions would you want the interviewer to ask?

What important reading should that person get their hands on to be ready?

Crowdsourcing Maps

Discussing Look into Neogeography.

David Cohn — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 23:36:08 -0500

This is a container for discussion on the assignment Look into Neogeography.

Crowdsourcing Maps

Tell us everything about where crowdsourced maps have gone wrong.

David Cohn — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 23:35:00 -0500

Tell us everything about where crowdsourced maps have gone wrong. Are there privacy disputes we should know about? Controversies? Everything is useful - links, descriptions, data, anecdotes. If this is something you've followed or want to research, the more details, the better.

Crowdsourcing Maps

Tell us about other similar map projects.

David Cohn — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 23:28:34 -0500

Here are some crowdsourced maps that we know about:

Neogeography

Cincinatti's Enquirer's map for bars that let you smoke inside.

Nashua Telegraph's map to cover an ice storm.

Gawker's infamous celeb-tracker map Gawker Stalker. (For those of you following George Clooney's fight against Gawker Stalker, hands off -- that interview belongs only to Lauren. Table for two, please!)

Chicago's crime stats: crime statistics.

Tell us about other similar map projects. Do they warrant further inquiry? Should we open up assignments related to any of these projects?

Crowdsourcing Maps